Doorway Pages in SEO

Introduction to Doorway Pages in SEO
Doorway pages are also specially created for search engines, these pages are ‘gateway’ or ‘bridge’ pages. They are created to do well for particular key phrases and are programmed to be visible only by specific search engine spiders. They are also sometimes known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages and entry pages. Doorway pages are built specifically to draw search engine visitors to your web site. They are typically standalone webpages designed only to act as doorways or entrances to your site.

The purpose behind building Doorway pages is generally just to trick search engines for higher rankings, and therefore doorway pages are considered to be an unethical SEO practice. They are generally considered a very bad idea for several reasons, though many SEO firms and those who indulge in ‘black hat’ SEO may use them routinely for SEO projects.

Doorway pages have acquired something of a bad reputation due to their frequent use (and abuse) in attempting to spam search engines and artificially influence the search engine results pages. The most flagrant abuses include mass production of machine-generated pages with only minor variations, sometimes using re-direction or cloaking so the visitor does not see the actual page requested.

The fact is that doorway pages don’t do a very good job of generating traffic for a web project, even when they are done by so called SEO “experts.” Many users simply hit the back buttons when presented with a doorway page. Still, many SEO firms count those first visits and report them to their clients as successes. But these very few visitors go ahead and visit their product’s page.

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